Sunday, November 8, 2015

With the 20-percent purchase of Reaction Engines, will BAE Systems
soon make the UK the next major space-faring nation?

By: Ringo Bones

Well, at least in the near future, BAE Systems could sell to
Virgin CEO Richard Branson a space tourism “aerospace-plane” that’s more
reliable than the Virgin Galactic Space Ship Two, but as BAE Systems purchases 20-percent of
Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines for UK£20.6-million in a deal that
will see the defence giant’s expertise applied to research on a privately held
company’s engine, which combines jet and rocket technology.

Nigel Whitehead, managing director at BAE Systems, said: “The
potential for this engine is incredible. I feel like we’re in the same position
as the people who were the first to consider putting a propeller on an internal
combustion engine: we understand that there are amazing possibilities but don’t
fully understand what they are, as we just can’t imagine them all. It could be
very high speed flight, low-cost launches into orbit or other fantastic
achievements.”

For 20 years, Reaction Engines has been developing its
Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE) which works like a conventional jet
engine while in the Earth’s atmosphere, sucking in oxygen-rich air to burn with
its hydrogen fuel. However, once it hits hypersonic speed starting at five
times the speed of sound – about 4,000 mph or three-times the speed of a
typical hunting rifle bullet – in the thin upper atmosphere, it switches over
to become a conventional liquid-fueled rocket engine using the liquid oxygen that
it carries as the oxidizer to burn with its hydrogen fuel. The ability to switch
between two very different modes of operation means that the SABRE engine
system is lighter than existing conventional liquid fuel rocket engines which
have to carry much more liquid oxygen in its operation where used up tanks are
then jettisoned.

Reaction Engine’s SABRE’s technological tour-de-force is the
development of a proprietary heat exchanger which cools the air going into the
engine to a level where it is almost liquid before it is ignited, allowing the
SABRE engine to swap between jet and rocket modes. The proprietary heat
exchanger can cool hot air from more than 1,000 degrees Celsius to minus 150
degrees Celsius in less than 1/100 of a second. With further research and
funding, the UK would be able to operate its own practical aerospace plane that
can send astronauts to low Earth orbit at a much reduced operational costs than
NASA’s Space Shuttle or those Russian rockets launched at Baikonur Cosmodrome.

As the first Mainland Chinese built passenger jet, will the
C919 revolutionize Asia’s airline industry?

By: Ringo Bones

As the first Mainland Chinese built passenger plane, the
C9191 was aimed to rival Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320 – two of the most
oft-used planes in the small to medium airline companies in Asia. As Mainland
China’s attempt to propel itself into the “top flight” of the global aviation
industry, the roll off of the C919 was witnessed by 4,000 spectators, including
Beijing’s senior communist party leaders, engineers and journalist as they
gathered at a hangar at Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport for the viewing
of the new 158-seat passenger plane.

The C919 is a product of the Commercial Aircraft Corporation
of China or COMAC. Work on the C919 began back in 2008 but its first test
flight, originally scheduled back in 2014, was postponed until 2016 according
to COMAC’s chief executive. While the “C” in C919 stands for China, many of the
plane’s subsystems have been provided by foreign companies, including Honeywell
and Rockwell Collins.

While it is no secret that the civil aviation business is
one of the fastest growing industry in Mainland China and the rest of East
Asia, Boeing predicts that by the year 2034, Mainland Chinese airline companies
will need to buy 4,630 new single-aisle passenger planes with a total worth of
about 490 billion US dollars and 1,500 new wide-bodied passenger planes worth
450 billion US dollars. So despite of the foreign competition, there would
still be buyers for COMAC’s C919 passenger jets. But despite growing demands
for new jet airliners in the Far East, most major airline companies in the
region at the moment prefer to buy their planes form the “big boys” – i.e. the
established passenger jet makers like the United State’s Boeing, the E.U.’s
Airbus and Brazil’s Embraer.

In our post 9/11 world does the October 31, 2015 crash of
the Russian Metrojet Flight 9268 represent another game changer for the civil
aviation industry?

By: Ringo Bones

With the latest findings of the European investigators of
the Russian Metrojet Flight 9268 after extensive forensic examination of its
black-box now point with 99-percent confidence that a smuggled explosive device
was the cause of the crash, the world now precociously face another “game-changer”
yet again for the post 9/11 civil aviation industry. Ever since the “shoe-bomber
incident”, air travel for ordinary folks in our post 9/11 world has been marked
by very invasive and draconian security checks where even items as innocuous as
baby formula exceeding a certain volume are banned in flights for fear that
they might be a “terrorist’s explosive device”. But does the recent Metrojet
Flight 9268 crash over the Sinai back in Halloween point that lax security
checks for airport workers might be the air travel industry’s weakest point?

While Russian newspapers loyal to the strongman Vladimir
Putin had been busy publishing “conspiracy theories” that MI-5 , CIA agents and
even those handful of Ukrainians fighting for Islamic State / Daesh are the
ones responsible for the crash of Metrojet Flight 9268 before Islamic State /
Daesh released a statement that they managed to successfully smuggle an
explosive device on board the flight that brought the plane down with the loss
of 217 passengers and 7 flight crew, it seems that this tragic event means that
another “inconvenient” security routine will be passed on to us, the average airline
commuter, yet again. And ordinary “budget tourists” of Russian, British and
other nationalities currently visiting Egypt are the very one’s inconvenienced
by the security implications of the tragic incident.

The aircraft involved was Airbus A321-231 operated by the Russian
airline company Kogalymavia – which is branded as Metrojet to non Russian
speakers exploded in mid air over the northern Sinai back in October 31, 2015
after it departed from Sharm el-Sheikh en route to St. Petersburg. While Egyptian
authorities have beefed up security in its major airports, this tragic incident
could ruin the still recovering tourism industry of Egypt.